Popular

August 7, 2008

Hammock’s “Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow” Met With Critical Acclaim

by Sam Savage

Since its release May 20, 2008 on Darla Records, "Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow" by Southern Ambient/Post-Rock duo Hammock has met with widespread critical praise from media tastemakers including Pitchfork ("an immersive listen"), All Music Guide ("a still and stunning beauty"), eMusic ("an amazing set of soaring instrumentals") and radio stalwarts such as KCRW, KEXP, and the PRI-syndicated program Echoes.

Original artwork for the six-panel, book-style CD digipak was created by Icelandic duo Riceboy Sleeps, which is an art collaboration between Jon Thor Birgisson (member of the Grammy-nominated band Sigur Ros) and Alex Somers (member of the band Parachutes). At the invitation of Birgisson and Somers, Hammock (Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson) gave their first-ever live performance at the after party celebration of the Riceboy Sleeps overseas debut art exhibition, held in Hot Springs, AR in August 2007. "Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow" is the studio recording of the original music written and played by Hammock for the occasion. "Studio performance" is a more accurate phrase, as the guitars for these songs were recorded live, just as the band performed them, later rounded out by Matt Slocum's expansive, emotive cello.

"The thought of playing live for the first time ever, and on top of that, doing it in the presence of Jonsi Birgisson and Alex Somers, triggered a bit of panic in the Hammock galaxy," says Marc Byrd, laughing. "But it presented us with a wonderful opportunity not only to meet two artists who have meant so much to us, but also to approach our music in a totally new way." The Hammock sound is a huge sonic cathedral, meticulously crafted, layer on layer. So how many cellos, how many singers, how many guitarists would it take to build the Hammock cathedral in an actual space-time environment? It seemed problematic, but Byrd and Thompson had a solution: they would strip Hammock down to its irreducible minimum -- the two of them, writing and performing new music with only with their two guitars and pedal boards. Byrd continues, "Some of the visual artists that Andrew and I admire the most will deliberately restrict themselves to working within a single medium to stir and focus themselves creatively... that's the approach we took for both the performance and the album."